HONG KONG — The hottest properties in Hong Kong have no walls, windows or even front doors. Forget condos, apartments and homes.

Real estate investors are scrambling for parking spaces.

Single slots are now selling for more than some modest Southern California homes. Witness the $288,000 paid in November for a parking place in a luxury apartment complex on Hong Kong Island. Or the $166,000 tab for a spot in a suburban development called Festival City. A space attached to an exclusive cliff side townhouse community in the ocean view neighborhood of Repulse Bay fetched $385,000 in March.

And those are just the recorded sales.

Jacinto Tong, head of Gale Well Group, a real estate investment firm, was offered $640,000 each for his two ground-floor parking spaces in an office building in the Wan Chai commercial district. He said he turned it down because he likes parking his Mercedes S500 on prime real estate near the elevator. The other spot is reserved for his driver.

“This market has gone crazy,” Tong said. “These spaces aren’t worth that much money.”

Parking has long been a prized commodity in land scarce Hong Kong. Tenants outnumber available slots by as much as 20-to-1 in some residential buildings, creating strong demand for spaces. But experts say the recent price explosion is the unintended fallout from a government effort to cool red-hot housing values.

Home prices in the former British colony have nearly doubled since early 2009, driven largely by wealthy buyers from mainland China. A typical 600-squarefoot apartment now costs about $577,000, according to property broker Savills. Prices soar into the millions in parts of Hong Kong Island, the city’s commercial and financial center.

Under pressure to slow housing costs, the Hong Kong government in the past year introduced curbs aimed at speculators. Starting in late October, a 15 percent “stamp duty” was levied on sales to non-permanent Hong Kong residents. A tax of 20 percent was imposed on properties resold within six months of purchase.

The result: Investors channeled their money into parking spaces, where the new rules did not apply.

Parking-space transactions in November rose more than five-fold compared with a year earlier at 1,640, according to Centaline, one of the largest real estate firms in Hong Kong. The average price of each space sold was $92,307, up 20 percent from a year earlier.

Naturally, Hong Kong banks offer mortgages for parking spaces. Small lenders are reportedly battling for customers with ever lower interest loans.

Some investors are looking to flip for a quick profit. Others are looking for a steady source of rental income. At nearly $745 a month, the average cost of leasing a space in Hong Kong in 2011 was behind only London and Zurich, according to Colliers International.

The lofty prices paid for parking berths are unthinkable for working-class Hong Kong residents - many of whom are finding their city painfully unaffordable.

Real estate has become a symbol of that struggle and a lightning rod for criticism. The city’s leader, Leung Chun-ying, is enmeshed in a scandal over illegal additions to his mansion on Victoria Peak.

Analysts say Hong Hong’s parking-space bubble is bound to burst. Developers have been releasing new spaces onto the market. Investors are also finding itharder to flip spaces because of rules in some property developments that restrict potential buyers to tenants only.

“I think this is a short term phenomenon,” said Shih Wing-ching of the real estate firm Centaline. “It won’t happen again.”

Not everyone is convinced. Francis Liu, an economist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, thinks the next big investment scheme could be taxi licenses - the costs of which have been spiraling up to $900,000.

“Mainlanders like to invest in them because they’re easy to buy and sell,” Liu said. “It’s the same concept as parking spaces.” Information for this article was contributed by Shirley Zhao of the Los Angeles Times.

Business, Pages 62 on 01/06/2013